Mumbo jumbo and me

Francis Wheen embarked on a defence of the intellectual
foundations of the modern world when he wrote his most recent book,
he tells Simon Caterson.

DELUSIONS come in waves, according to Francis Wheen. At the same
time, his book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World has
created a ripple or two of its own since publication last year.

"I've noticed the phrase or word 'mumbo jumbo' occurring a lot
more these days," he says. "I don't know if that is anything to do
with it being in the title of the book. Quite often I read
newspapers and come across what I think might be echoes of the
book, little references that make me think the writer has read it,
particularly when I see it in conjunction with the words like
'retreat from reason' or 'enlightenment legacy'. Maybe a lot of
people had this idea at the same time."

Whatever the explanation, there could be few more eloquent,
witty and incisive defenders of rational thinking than Wheen.
Mumbo-Jumbo was written in response to what its author
sees as the hydra-headed threat to the intellectual and scientific
foundations on which the modern world was built.

Wheen says the full implications of what he characterises as
"the new irrationalism" only emerged during the actual writing. "I
didn't set out to write that, it just became that. The more I
thought about it, the more it seemed that that was what was
happening and there were certain things that needed to be defended
rather more vigorously and publicly than had been the case."

A well-known biographer, columnist and broadcaster in Britain,
in addition to being deputy editor of the satirical magazine
Private Eye, Francis Wheen is certainly qualified to take up the
cudgels. He even has some early personal experience of delusional
thinking, having as a 16-year-old schoolboy run away from boarding
school in the early 1970s to join the counter-culture in London. "I
left a note saying please don't try to find me, I've gone to join
the alternative society."

A brief period spent among drug-addled hippies in squalid squats
persuaded Wheen to return to his formal education at Harrow, but he
did rebel again sufficiently to eschew the beaten path to Oxford
and Cambridge and choose instead to study at the relatively obscure
Royal Holloway College, part of the University of London.

Wheen's preference for going against the grain has informed his
work, which includes a biography of Karl Marx written at a time in
the late 1990s when Marx's reputation was at a low ebb. This book
won plaudits from commentators on both the left and right, much to
Wheen's relief. His previous book, The Soul of
Indiscretion, was a biography of British MP Tom Driberg, whose
scandalous life featured cottaging, allegations of spying and
friendship with the Kray twins.

Crucial to the effectiveness of Wheen's argument is that, by
definition and as a matter of principle, there are no sacred cows.
Refreshingly non-partisan and often very funny, Wheen exposes mumbo
jumbo merchants of both the left and the right and finds disturbing
convergences within the mainstream and parallels among religious
and political extremists of every stripe.

Underpinning the assault on the Enlightenment, Wheen contends,
is an irrational protest against the modern world that is both pre-
and postmodern. "They weren't in alliance because they don't work
together, but the pre-modernists and the postmodernists had been in
a sort of pincer movement, a two-pronged attack on modernity in the
sense of the enlightenment legacy - reason, secularism, scientific
empiricism, that sort of thing - and actually also on the very idea
of progress, the very notion that improvement is possible."

Wheen begins Mumbo-Jumbo with the rise to power in 1979
of Margaret Thatcher and the Ayatollah Khomeini, two leaders who,
he says, "did not have much in common except that they believed
that the way forward was to turn the clock back. That sort of
atavistic impulse seemed to have become quite common".

In British politics, according to Wheen, a similarly irrational
impulse was behind the recent formal alliance between Islamists
associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and elements of the far left
under the banner of the Respect Coalition. "They have nothing in
common except their opposition to American intervention in Iraq. It
is grim seeing this betrayal by the left."

Wheen says this type of unlikely alliance increasingly can be
anticipated. "I find that more and more. It is not just the people
you would expect to be slightly neanderthal in their attitudes -
creationists, flat-earthers, as it were - but actually people who
think of themselves as radicals, progressives. That is part of the
problem I've found with postmodernism."

Wheen regards postmodernist theories to be dangerous as well as
spurious.

"They resist the very notion of progress or anything as coherent
as that, but actually this groovy, playful postmodernist attitude
ended up playing into the hands of people like the creationists and
even revisionist neo-Nazi historians like David Irving who say no
Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. The final terminus of postmodernism
in history was that there is no such thing as historical truth and
so Irving can then brandish this and say, 'well, there you are, you
see, I say there were no Jews killed at Auschwitz, other people say
that quite a lot were, they are both just theories, none is truer
than the other'. So even alleged radicals seem to have ended up
heading backwards at high speed to a pre-Enlightenment mode."

AS he was writing Mumbo-Jumbo, Wheen says he heard
echoes of a book that had covered a similar topic more than 150
years ago. Charles McKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds proved on occasion to have unexpected
relevance.

"McKay has a longish section on Nostradamus but he treats him as
a historical curiosity in a way. He says a lot of people used to
read Nostradamus but nowadays not many people do except perhaps for
a few elderly farming wives in the Walloon country in Belgium.
McKay's book was published in 1841 but straight after September 11,
2001, within a week or two, Nostradamus was right up there at the
top of the New York Times bestseller list."

Once they gain a certain level of acceptance, mass delusions can
spread like wildfire. "They're contagious, as with clothes
fashions," says Wheen. "Lots of people quite like to be in the
swim, running with the herd, as it were. There's something
comforting about the idea that you're not alone, especially if
people do feel atomised in some way. It is probably very reassuring
to have that, even if it is often delusory."

Delusion is so insidious that not even the heroes of the
Enlightenment were immune from the occasional fit of frenzy. In
Mumbo-Jumbo, Wheen outs Isaac Newton, one of the founders
of the Enlightenment, as not only a committed alchemist but also
the abject victim of stockmarket hysteria, learning to his cost
during one of the most celebrated sharemarket disasters of all time
that what goes up must come down.

"Even the man who discovered physical gravity forgot about the
laws of financial gravity. Newton actually got out in time from the
South Sea Company at a profit, then couldn't quit while he was
ahead. He went back in at the top of the market and lost about
20,000 quid. I remember reading about it years ago and thinking,
we're all so much more sophisticated now, aren't we? I couldn't
believe anyone could fall for that old trick now, and then we get
to the end of the 20th century and we have dotcom mania."

Wheen says Newton's susceptibility to delusion is not unique.
"It occurred to me the other day that Arthur Conan Doyle invented
Sherlock Holmes, one of the great fictional embodiments of the
rational deductive method - finding evidence, observation and all
the rest of it. Conan Doyle himself was, however, a keen
spiritualist, especially in later life, when he also fell for these
ridiculous hoax photos of fairies at the bottom of the garden."

The Cottingley fairies, as they became known, turned out to be
nothing more than cut-outs from a children's book, but Conan Doyle
was convinced they were real and became their chief promoter. "You
think how could you create Sherlock Holmes and still fall for this
pathetic scam, but people do again and again. There must be a part
of their minds where they switch off the normal level of
intelligence they would apply to something and are just completely
enchanted by some particular idea or obsession and everything goes
out the window."

Wheen concedes that the rise of the new irrationalism in the
last quarter of a century has coincided with immense advances in
science and technology. "This is the bizarre thing. This exact
period I'm writing about is also a period of the most extraordinary
scientific and technological achievement, from the mapping of the
human genome to the creation of the internet. It seems paradoxical
that there should be this proliferation of mumbo jumbo at a time of
such immense change and upheaval, but that may be a partial
explanation for it."

At this point, Wheen evokes the spirit of Karl Marx, who
detected similar turmoil during the industrial revolution and whose
critique of capitalism Wheen says has never been more relevant than
it is today. Marx has just been voted Britain's favourite thinker
in a poll conducted by the BBC. With his biography of Marx proving
highly successful, Wheen jokingly claims credit for his own role as
Marx's campaign manager.

"Until quite recently, most people stayed put in the same job or
institution throughout their lives, but no one expects to do that
now. As Marx put it: All that is solid melts into air."

As for pre-Enlightenment institutions in Britain such as the
monarchy and the established church, Wheen, who is strongly
republican, regards these as "strange anachronisms".

"It is a bit like the discovery of a lone coelacanth swimming
off the coast of South Africa which you'd thought had been extinct
for 300 million years. It makes no sense at all to have a monarchy
and an established church, though I don't think anybody really
believes that the Queen has a divine right to rule."

The resistance to mumbo jumbo continues but one of Wheen's
current projects is a departure from polemic. He is working on the
latest of several drafts of his first screenplay. It is an
adaptation of The Irresistible Con, Wheen's biography of Charlotte
Bach, an eccentric intellectual who emerged in 1971 in London to
announce a bold new theory of sex and evolution. Only after Bach's
death a decade later was it revealed that "she" was in fact a
strange Hungarian con man whose real name was Karoly Hajdu and
whose previous aliases had been many and varied.

While writing for films lacks the finality of producing books,
Wheen says there are compensations. The film is supposed to star
Alfred Molina, which Wheen finds pleasing not just because of the
actor's ability.

"My two young sons are at last genuinely impressed by something
I've done because they saw him in Spider-man 2, where he plays the
baddie. It is all very gratifying from that point of view and gives
me an inducement to get on with the next draft."

How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World is published by Harper
Perennial at $24.95